Medieval Chinese companies

[Dangun]

Does anyone have a source which gives the number of soldiers in a Chinese infantry dui (company) or tuan (batallion)?
Preferably from the early medieval period.

Thanks

[Duncan Head]

A dui is normally 50 men, at least under the Tang. See this extract (starting p57).

[Dangun]

A dui is normally 50 men, at least under the Tang. See this extract (starting p57).

Thank you sir.

[Andreas Johansson]

The dui was also 50 men under the Jurchen Jin, at least right at the beginning of the dynasty. Likely this means it was so straight through the Five Dynasties and Northern Song too.

(Source: the Sanchao Beimeng Huibian, paraphrased in Herbert Franke, Krieg und Krieger in Chinesischen Mittelalter, 2003)

[Dangun]

Sadly, it seems more complicated than this...

I've just found another quote by Graff, (the same author that supplied the quote suggesting 50 men estimate for a company, kindly provided by Duncan) in which where he assumes that a dui was a 100 men (Chinese Medieval Warfare 300 to 900).

I've also found a quote from one of the Chinese histories (Sui Shu), so within Li Jing's life time (the historical figure quoted by Graff in The Eurasian Way of Warfare), in which cavalry dui were 100 men. Now obviously cavalry are different. But it would be a little weird if cavalry companies had more men in them than infantry companies.

[Andreas Johansson]

FWIW, the 50-man Jin dui where of cavalry.

[Duncan Head]

Graff (p.62 of the original link) also quotes Li Jing as saying:

As soon as they see two flags cross at the commander-in-chief's position, five companies combine to form a single company - that is, with 250 men forming one unit (dui).

So some of the references to larger dui might perhaps be to combined companies.

But Lorge, Warfare and the Creation of the Northern Song p.40 says that under the Northern Song both infantry and cavalry companies were 100 strong, grouped into 500-man battalions.

[Dangun]

Interesting references all.

Variability is to be expected, I guess.
I wonder if the variability is all historical or perhaps some variability is chronicling error.

[Patrick Waterson]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I understood that Chinese infantry traditionally organised around 5-man files or sections, which would make a 50-man unit a natural strength for a dui.  Larger dui could presumably be assembled depending on doctrine, and the existence of a 250-man dui suggests that a dui, irrespective of size, is the level of organisation below tuan.  A tuan would logically be 500 men, consisting of 2-10 dui, subdivision perhaps depending upon the availability of lower unit officers.

In the present communist Chinese army, a tuan is equivalent to a regiment rather than a battalion.  I am not sure how far back this can be taken, and whether it would affect unit size.

Given what Duncan and Andreas have unearthed so far, I would be inclined to use a 50-man dui of ten files and a 500-man tuan of ten dui as a rule of thumb while keeping open the possibility that dui of larger size could be formed, either as standard or as temporary accretions of multiple 50-man dui.

[Dangun]

In Graff's Medieval Chinese Warfare

On page 147, concerning a passage in the Book of the Sui dated to 612AD
* Dui is translated as companies
* Infantry companies are described as "presumably also 100 strong"

On page 193, concerning the writings of Li Jing (571-649)
* Dui is translated as platoons
* "For Li, the fifty-man platoon is the fundamental, irreducible unit for deployment and maneuver"

It is hard to reconcile these.
Maybe its reality varying through time, or maybe its the ancient historian or the modern historian adding variability
Assuming its not the latter, a footnote would have helped.

More later...

[Patrick Waterson]

We have previously seen dui of varying sizes, not unlike the Greek lochos, which for everyone except the Spartans seems to have been the 'fundamental, irreducible unit for deployment and manoeuvre'.  (The Spartans had a smaller enomotia of 30-36 men.)  The lochos could range from 100 to 600 men, depending upon the time period and city-state.

For Chinese armies, our earlier references give us 50 as a minimum, and 250 as a maximum, size for a dui.  Unless Li Jing has found something explicit, I suspect his 50-man dui may be as much of an educated guess as Graff's 100-man dui.  And both could be right!  Size seems to vary over time and situation as much as for a western 'company' - c.50 men for a 'company' in a 500-man regiment of the American War of Independence; c.250 men for a 'company' in a First World War infantry battalion.

For me, the trick is to work the numbers and see if the army's overall size comes out about right.  This is usually an indicator one is on the right track.

[Andreas Johansson]

Li Jing was there, so I think we can assume he knows what he was talking about. 

[Duncan Head]

Li Jing was there, so I think we can assume he knows what he was talking about. 

Indeed: 571-649. But - the perennial problem with manuals - he was primarily writing about how things should be, rather than how they necessarily were (let alone how they actually were fifty years earlier or two hundred years later).